Remember that one day when you could wake up without an alarm? When you would get your favorite bowl of cereal and sit between the hours of 8 and 12? This is a blog dedicated to the greatest time of our childhood: Saturday mornings. The television programs you watched, the memories attached to them, and maybe introducing you to something you didn't realize existed. Updated every weekend.

In the earliest days of television,
movie studios sought to make use of the large library of shorts they had
already created for the theaters by packaging them for broadcast on the
networks. Not only would this provide a second return on their initial
investment, but it also meant that studios could avoid the costs of producing
anything new. Warner
Bros. made their entry into the television animation market with
1960’s The Bugs Bunny Show.

Bugs and friends ready to broadcast on television.

The Bugs Bunny Show made its debut on
October 11, 1960 on ABC.
It was a prime-time half-hour anthology series that aired on Tuesdays. Each
episode was comprised of three Looney Tunesand Merrie Melodiestheatrical shorts from 1948-on
(everything before then was sold to Associated
Artists Productions). As the name implied, “hosting” the show was
Bugs Bunny (Mel Blanc) in a series of all-new linking segments that ran with
each episode.

The Goofy Gophers politely insisting the other host first.

The premise of the segments was that Bugs
and his friends were putting on a variety show before a live audience. Bugs
would typically serve as emcee, but other characters could have their turn as
well. These segments were written, produced, directed, and storyboarded by Chuck Jones
and Friz
Freleng, with Robert McKimson later
taking over directorial duties. Because of the pedigree of the creators
involved, the new segments often matched the quality of the shorts they
accompanied. These segments were rendered in color like the shorts, despite the
initial broadcasts of the show being in black and white (color television
didn’t become the standard until the mid-1960s).

Bugs plugging his sponsor.

For the second season, the bridging
sequences were made more elaborate. Each one directly correlated to the shorts
shown in a particular episode, and sometimes was used to expand upon their
plots or connect them into one long story. These new episodes were also given
their own distinctive titles. A total of 52 episodes were made between both
seasons, keeping the Warner Bros.
animation studio open in spite of the decreased demand for
theatrical shorts.

Production art of Daffy fleeing from Taz.

Mack
David and Jerry Livingston wrote
and composed the series’ opening theme, “This Is It.” The intro featured Bugs
and Daffy Duck (also Blanc) singing the song on stage in a duet before being
joined by a chorus of other Looney Tunes characters: Tweety Bird, Speedy
Gonzales, Hippety Hopper,
Yosemite Sam, Sylvester Cat, Elmer Fudd, Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote and
Foghorn Leghorn. Immediately following the intro, the sponsor of that
particular episode would get a mention from the cast. The end sequence showed
the curtain dropping on the stage and the copyright information of the aired
cartoons highlighted within a spotlight beam. The final episode of the original
run aired on August 7, 1962, and the studio closed the following year.

ABC moved reruns of the show to Saturday mornings immediately following
its conclusion, switching it to color broadcasts in 1965. In 1967, the show was
moved to Sunday where it remained until 1968. At that point, CBS had acquired the
broadcast rights and combined it with their own Warner Bros. anthology series, The Road Runner Show. The new The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour (called “Show”
in the on-screen titles) debuted on September 14, 1968. It kept both shows’
individual intros intact with a new bridging segment of Bugs introducing the Road
Runner by McKimson. The bridging segments from both shows were edited and
combined to link the seven shorts shown each episode.

CBS Saturday morning ad featuring The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show.

When ABC acquired The Road Runner Show in 1971, The Bugs Bunny Show returned to its
original half-hour format on September 6 featuring additional edits to the
bridging sequences and a new selection of shorts. The Bugs Bunny Show returned to ABC on September 8, 1973 for two
seasons until moving back to CBS for an all-new The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on September 6, 1975. When
Sylvester and Tweety were given their own show in 1976, their shorts were
removed from the Hour rotation. Hour also received a spin-off, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, which
aired Tuesday nights from April through June.

On November 19, 1977, CBS added
another half-hour, renaming it The Bugs
Bunny/Road Runner Show. It was joined by a two companion programs: The Bugs Bunny/Speedy Gonzales/Porky Pig
Show and The Sylvester & Tweety,
Daffy and Speedy Show. Following Sylvester
& Tweety’s cancellation in 1983, those shorts were incorporated into Bugs Bunny/Road Runner. As a result, it
was expanded it by an additional half-hour that aired as two separate hour-long
programs. That same year, the show was reduced back to 90-minutes, given a new
opening sequence, and its bridging sequences were dropped entirely. In 1984, a
new intro was created utilizing clips from the various cartoons in order to
accompany the new theme song, “It’s Cartoon Gold”,
written by John Klawitter and
composed by Steve
Zuckerman.

CBS gave up the broadcast rights to
the Warner Bros. cartoons in 1985, resulting in the show returning to ABC as The Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes Comedy Hour. For
the first season, cartoons featuring Tweety weren’t shown. Neither were
cartoons featuring Speedy; likely due to complaints of racial stereotyping. The
following season, the show was cut to a half-hour with Tweety shorts added back
into the mix, and it was renamed The Bugs
Bunny & Tweety Show on September 13, 1986.In the third season, the show was restored to an hour and “This Is
It” was reinstated as the opening theme with a newly animated intro reminiscent
of the original Bugs Bunny Show.
Another new intro sequence would follow in 1992.

The
Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show remained on ABC until the end of the century.
It was one of the few non “educational and informative” cartoons to survive the
new FCC
regulations for children’s programming. It was also the last non-Disney program to
remain on the network following Disney’s purchase of it in 1996 as their
contract to run it had not yet expired. It was integrated into Disney’s
One Saturday Morningprogramming
block when it debuted in 1997; however, the “Disney” name was omitted from
commercial bumpers aired during the show. In 1999, the show was once again
reduced to a half-hour for the final time before it was cancelled due to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies libraries being made exclusive to Cartoon Network.
The last episode aired on September 2, 2000.

With 40 years on the air, The Bugs Bunny Show in all its formatsis credited with keeping the Golden Age
Warner Bros. cartoons in the American consciousness and inspiring legions of
creative people who grew up watching them. The title sequences and some of the
linking segments were included as bonus features on the first five volumes of
the Looney
Tunes Golden Collection. Because of the damage to the negatives
caused by CBS and ABC’s edits for later broadcasts, a combination of color
footage from what’s left of the negatives and the black and white broadcast
prints from the 1960s were used for their presentation. Golden Collection: Volume 2 also features the opening to The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show and the
1988 and 1992 intros of The Bugs Bunny
& Tweety Show. An episode of The
Bugs Bunny Show was included on the 2009 DVD compilation set Saturday
Morning Cartoons: 1960s Volume 2and an episode of The Bugs
Bunny/Road Runner Show was included on the follow-up set, 1970s
Volume 2.

EPISODE GUIDE (“rev”
dates are when re-edited versions of an episode aired):

Season 1:

#1
(10/11/60) – Bugs introduces all of his co-stars, excluding Daffy despite his
best efforts.